Watch Univa’s "Look What We’ve Done with Grid Engine"

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Someday economic historians will really appreciate what Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, and others have done by extending the open source code concept with value-added features. Ten years ago, Sun released the source code for its “Sun Grid Engine” resource management middleware that it bundled with Solaris servers. Yet Sun kept its development team coding Grid Engine, providing free binaries, and community support. Soon, Grid Engine was deployed in more than 10,000 data centers. Companies like the flexibility inherent with professionally supported open source software.

When Oracle acquired Sun, it closed the open source community and stopped shipping source code. This is left many companies feeling exposed with unsupported software. This is where Univa comes in. Earlier this year, Univa announced that it had hired the core Grid Engine development team to focus on the future of Grid Engine, now known as Univa Grid Engine. So, who is Univa?

In a nutshell, Univa offers software to optimize shared, high-demand data center resources whether your data center is on premise, in the cloud, or some sort of in-house and cloud hybrid mix. Its solutions focus on making your data center easier to set up, run, and manage by making workloads, resources, and processes more automated and efficient. (They also have tools for streamlining application and license management.) For optimizing workloads and resources, Univa offers Grid MP for building distributed networks from non-dedicated resources and Grid Engine for optimizing shared resources. Today’s Check It Out concerns a wide-ranging, on-demand webinar explaining Univa Grid Engine.

Right off the bat, let me tell you that the middle third of this broadcast is for data center geeks and Grid Engine mavens. You’ll love it. The first third is for those of you searching for solutions to optimize your shared resources. It — and the last third — is also for those who already deployed Grid Engine and are wondering what’s going on. You’ll especially love it.

Suffice it to say, a lot is going on with Univa Grid Engine. Univa Grid Engine versions 8.0 and 8.0.1 were recently released. Together, there more than 200 fixes, updates, and features over the open source version (which Univa Grid Engine supports). But what is truly interesting is the road map for Univa Grid Engine development, which begins at about the 30-minute mark of the webinar. The future looks bright, especially because Univa openly solicits the Grid Engine community for their ideas.

People tend to view open source software as a cost-free alternative to commercial software. It’s not. There are staff and support costs — e.g., installation and configuration, bug fixes, daily maintenance, integration with other software, and coding enhancements to grow as your needs grow. Perhaps the three costs most dear with open source are what’s going with my mission critical software, when’s the bug fix, and who are the people doing the coding anyway?

Univa answers all that. Like Red Hat supports and extends open source Linux, Univa supports and extends open source Grid Engine. It’s that simple. This means that you get new, professionally developed features and premium capabilities not yet — or maybe never — available in the open source code base proactively. So, you get all the benefits of a commercial solution with all the functionality you need, and you can help define new features too. Good stuff. Hit the link (registration required at Univa).